Untitled (from the series Torção)

Sônia Gomes
Born in Caetanopolis, Brazil, in 1948.
She lives and works in Belo Horizonte, in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Caetanopolis, where Sônia Gomes was born, is the center of the Brazilian textile industry and her artistic muse. It was named for Caetano Mascarenhas, who built the first textile factory there in 1953, when Gomes was five years old. Over the years, she has developed an elaborate method of sculpting with textile-based materials such as fabric, string, wire, found objects, and a variety of other materials that have been given to her. Her resulting sculptures are twisted, organic, singular works of art that intertwine the social and physical memory of factory-made materials with the artist’s personal associations and expressions.
Gomes’s sculpture builds on a longstanding post-World War II movement to dissolve the distinctions between art and craft, genius and labor. In her work, she transforms everyday industrial materials that are typically perceived as subordinate—such as fabric and glass—into lively objects imbued with formal beauty and social value beyond mere decoration. As she explains it, her work is neither utilitarian nor straightforward in its artistic intent. Instead, she works closely and intuitively with her materials to explore their vital essence, inexplicably connecting them in place and time.
In 2013, Gomes’s work was included in the group exhibition Art & Textiles: Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art from Klimt to the Present at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, and in 2014 she was awarded the PIPA Prize (Premio Investidor Profissional de Arte), which recognizes influential contemporary artists in Brazil.
There is no underlying archetypal form that defines Gomes’s sculpture. Nor is her work iterative in the conventional sense of repeating an operation to achieve a desired outcome. Instead, she develops a menagerie of free forms that depart from the principles of mass production that characterize today’s cultures of consumption and computation. Just what drives Gomes’s work at its core remains elusive, and thus challenges viewers to experience it as uncertain manifestations of mindfulness and embodiment. Her sculptures appear as spatial poems that convey both conceptual and physical momentum. Gomes, however, refers to them as nests or cradles that welcome and protect her rambling thoughts and her rebellious soul.